The Gambler
by IckieZiegler
Summary: An easy solution to all of Dante and Lulu's current problems. One-Shot


**[align=center][b][u]The Gambler[/b][/u]  
** [i] _You have to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to talk away, know when to run. You never count your money when you're sitting at the table. There'll be time enough for counting when the dealings done._ [/i][/align]

"What are you doing here?" Dante asked as he opened the door. He was reluctant to sound hopeful, but the more she randomly appeared at his place the better in his opinion. If she wanted to show up everyday just to yell at him then it was fine, because he'd get to see her.

"I can't fix you, Dante." She started slowly. "But maybe I can help fix us."

"I want that more than anything," he sighed the truth. He looked down and noticed her clutching the neck of a bottle wrapped in a plastic bag. "What's that?"

"Tequila," she stated as if it were obvious. "I think that we can't work if every other month something new pops up and we keep hiding things from each other for whatever fears we have..." She took a deep breath as she sat down on the couch. "I have secrets too." He cautiously sat down next to her unsure where this conversation could be going. "I don't consciously keep them from you… I haven't lied to you about them… but if they were to come up… I'm not sure I'd want to tell you…" Her mouth kept moving while every part of her mind told her to stop.

"Like your abortion?"

"Kind of. Worse stuff…" She couldn't look at him yet so she watched the bottle as she gripped in it tight. "Stuff I didn't want to tell you or for you to know because you're a cop."

"Illegal stuff?"

"Well, yeah."

"I have no illusions that you're a strict law abiding citizen, Lulu," he said with a smile. "I've never seen anyone pick a lock the way you can, and I've heard about you buying your father's Cubans… It's fine."

"It's not silly stuff like that. It's…" She knew it would have been difficult to start this conversation, but the feelings that clouded her gut were worth getting rid of. If they could find their happiness again then it was a gamble worth taking. "I never expected you to put me first, especially not your job. I was well aware what your priorities were. Your mom, your job, your family, and then me and that was fine. I'm not complaining about that because that's perfectly reasonable. But then this other woman shows up and she's more important to you than your job which made her a whole lot more important than me…"

"She's not. She's not more than important than you. It was my past and if I could take it…" He tried to defend himself.

Lulu shook her head and interrupted, "It doesn't matter. My point is that I couldn't expect you to put me before the law. So there are things in my past that I couldn't tell you because it was too much of a risk. It still is a risk. A huge risk."

"No it's not. You can tell me anything."

"No, I couldn't, but you could have told me anything without those same fears and you still choose not to. I still choose not to tell you, and that's why we'd never work."

"I thought we were going to try and fix us?" He felt panicked and sick as if all the hope in the world had left his body.

"That's why I brought tequila," she said with the smallest smile. "We can either tell each other all the scary stuff we afraid to admit to each other or we can just go our separate ways… because I don't think I can go through constantly." She looked at him for the first time. "I'd rather walk away with the memory of our relationship than shred it to pieces."

He used his finger to tuck some hair behind her ear to expose more of her face. It was the first time he had been able to touch her in weeks, and a burst of energy shot through every inch of his body. "Okay," was all he said, but he didn't smile. His nerves surged in every direction.

"I understand if you don't…"

"I want to." He shot up and walked towards the kitchen. "Glasses or shots?"

"Glasses. If we do shots then you'll be trashed too quickly," she quipped.

"I nearly forgot you were a professional drinker. Is that why you brought it? To display your talents and make me weak at the knees?"

"No. There are some things I don't think I could ever admit to sober…" She stopped smiling.

Dante sat down next to her on the couch and pulled the bottle from her hand. As he poured he told her, "Before we start…" He exhaled lowly. "I love you." He watched her sad eyes fix themselves on the glasses in front of them. "Lulu…" He grabbed her attention. "I really love you... more than ever and certainly more than anything or anyone. There is absolutely nothing you could tell me tonight that is going to change that." She didn't speak but her body softened before his eyes as if she were going to conform to the couch. He handed her a glass and clinked them together. "I'll go first."

For the first time in months he uncensored himself letting go of all the melodrama he had surrounded his life with. He explained everything he had thought about Brenda in the past and in the present, and fought the urge to stop short when he notice Lulu taking more frequent ships of her glass. "I was confused and I didn't know up from down when it came to her," he told her taking stock of how long she stopped looking at him while he explained how he had thought he was in love with another woman. He admitted to the dreams he had lied to her about, and then dove into the first bit of information she had not been aware of.

Suddenly her eyes didn't leave him for a minute while he told her about the baby Brenda had been pregnant with when they met, the one he fathered on paper and gave away. "When you walked in here and saw me comforting her… I had just asked her what happened to the baby, and she had told me that it… he… died in Africa."

"I'm sorry your son died," she managed to choke out.

"He wasn't my son. I didn't know even know she had put me as the father until after she had made these papers for me to sign." Then he went on to explain why he had been keeping secrets even though he was no longer trying to defend his cowardly actions. He finished the tale of Brenda and then told her the only other secret he could possibly think of which was his one and only one night stand. He ran into her for the second time on a plane months ago and didn't want to tell her… even though she had tried to sleep with him again. He was always committed to Lulu.

"I'm glad I brought the tequila," She said after he was done. There was a dull buzzing in her head now, and the alcohol was hardly enough to take the edge off. It was her turn and she didn't even know where to start. "I guess, I'll start with Dillon…" She told him about her grandmother not being able to handle her, living with the Quartermaines, and how that led to her ruining her best friends marriage. "I was a different person." She gave a small giggle. "I was Carly. I'm just like Carly. I mean… I've learned to repress certain impulses since high school… but they're still in me." She smiled again talking about how she renewed her friendship with Georgie and the trouble she had managed to get herself into after the abortion. Going with Jason to track down Spinelli after Sonny rescued her, the hostage situation at the Metro Court with Jerry Jax threatening to kill her, and everything else that led to meeting Logan.

"Whose Logan?"

"My dead ex," she stated bluntly.

"You've never mentioned him before…?" He questioned. Before he knew it he was in a tale of two people trying to renew themselves before it shattered into a pile of lies at Maxie's feet. Dante could hardly believe his ears when he heard the depth of hatred the current best friends had for each other. "So, what happened after you left Logan's apartment?"

"I was hitchhiking my way back to down…or anywhere… and I met Johnny."

"You're kidding, right?"

"Nope." She shook her head and smiled, and told him about the intense back and forth of feelings she had between Johnny and Logan until it resulted in Logan trying to frame Johnny for a string of murders in which some of her friends and family members were taken. Dante had a vague recollection of the Text Message Killer, but never came across he in depth information Lulu divulged. "I found all this stuff in his room, the stuff he was planning on planting at Johnny's, he got so angry when I confronted him…" Her eyes trailed off into space. "Johnny started banging on the door and Logan grabbed me. I panicked and grabbed the nearest object… which happened to be a wrench… and hit him over the head. I, uh, actually cracked his skull and put him in a coma."

"Is that how he died?" was the only all he could verbalize among the sea of questions swarming his mind.

"No. He woke up and explained everything. He got his father, also known as my mother's ex-husband, to stop harassing me about attempted murder." The conversation moved towards her growing relationship with Johnny, which sounded like it ended every few minutes, the blackmail, and the increasing tension with Logan. "I told him repeatedly that we were over, I had moved on, and he just wouldn't get it. He came into Crimson during work and Maxie and I tried to get rid of him. I just got so angry that I told him that I was glad he had slept with Maxie because when I left him I met Johnny."

"Wow," Dante choked out in the middle of a ship of tequila.

"He was so angry and he kept saying that I was supposed to be the one that saved him. That's when Maxie and I started to agree on things. He had gone crazy… And apparently he had waited at Crimson for me and Kate to leave. To get Maxie on her own and he attacked her." She took a large swallow from her glass and felt the burn climb down her throat. "Johnny and I had a fight so I went back to his place at the Metro Court to talk to him, I went to his balcony because I thought I heard fireworks, and I could see into Crimson from there. When I looked down I saw Logan standing over Maxie… he looked up and he saw me. I knew he was coming. So… I tried to call the cops, but he called me and told me that it was a misunderstanding… a whole lot of other stuff. It gets a little hazy. He started banging on Johnny's door begging me to let him in. I had the lights off and the door locked… He started breaking down the door with an axe they have for fire situations. I had grabbed a knife out of the drawer and hid behind the couch. I didn't intend on hurting him… I guess I thought if I was holding a knife I would be able to keep enough distance between us for me to get to the door and run, but when he got here I dropped it. I tried to run for the door but he grabbed me. So, I started to pretend to give in… that I'd give him another chance and we could be together." She started shaking her head. "He bought it until he tried to kiss me and then he knew I was faking it. He threw me down. I found the knife on the floor and all I did was pick it up." Tears flooded her cheeks. "It's hard to remember. I don't think I want to. It was like I blinked and he was right next to me and the knife was in his abdomen. I didn't even have to move. I didn't want him dead, and I didn't want to kill him…"

Dante was stiff with shock. He had no idea what had happened to him in the past few minutes that Lulu had been talking. It felt like a cold trick the universe was playing on him… on them. He thought about offering his hand to Lulu for strength, but he couldn't summon the will power to move at all. Or speak to reassure her that it was all going to be okay.

"Johnny and Maxie found me sitting with Logan's body. They both agreed… quickly… that we couldn't call the cops. There was no proof, no witnesses to say that I didn't mean to kill him, or to prove that he had attacked me or Maxie. Maxie thought Mac would believe us, but Scott Baldwin already wanted me for attempted murder when I put Logan in the hospital. He also hates everything remotely adjacent to my father… and he was the special prosecutor."

Dante listened closely to the cover up which would have made him detest Johnny even more if Lulu hadn't followed up with how Johnny had nearly taken five years in prison for Lulu's freedom. She told him about people basically chasing her around town trying to keep her from confessing and how she got so fed up with it all she brought a gun to the PCPD to break Johnny out of jail. Hearing about Johnny's love for Lulu nearly made Dante physically ill and he was doing everything in his power to keep from expressing it. Johnny had taken Lulu to Manhattan, had planned a life with her on the run, and basically made a home when they couldn't go back to theirs. He listened to her story take a turn for the worst as she started to see Logan's dead body taunting her, how Johnny told her she had been spacing out, and it all building up into her mistaking Johnny for Logan in a fit of panic. Then, Johnny checked her into Shadybrook where she was put in a straitjacket and sedated.

"I couldn't get things right and he'd randomly pop up. I couldn't stop it." She had a long string of visitors, the most surprising of which to Dante was his father, and Lulu gave critic to Sonny for understand what it was like to lose their reality. She smiled when she mentioned that Sonny made her feel like it was okay to at least try to listen to the doctors even though sometimes she found it physically impossible.

It was the first time Lulu had really talked about her mother with him. There were times when Laura got mentioned as a guest appearance in the earlier days of Lulu's childhood, or when she was trying to reassure him at his mother's bedside, but there was nothing about what it was like to see her mother catatonic for a large portion of her life. Lulu smiled through tears when she spoke about her mother helping her get rid of Logan even if everyone believed her mother was in her head, and how she managed to talk herself into believing she was getting better.

"At Johnny's trial I just lost it. Somehow magically over night Logan had become an undercover cop and they wanted to give him the death penalty. I couldn't handle the fact that he was on trial for something I did so I confessed on the stand… everybody thought I was just trying to take the blame for my boyfriend… I did more damage than good so Claudia… one of the few things she ever did right… she got on the stand and made up this long story about having an affair with Logan, and that Johnny killed him to save her. She saved Johnny. He was acquitted."

"But you were still in Shadybrook?" He sat down his glass on the table unable to finish his second course.

"Yeah. The doctors convinced Johnny not to come see me, and I started to get these notes saying that I should pay for killing Logan Hayes. People actually thought I had written them myself, but Spinelli and Maxie were all over proving it wasn't me, trying to break me out of Shadybrook… They did everything they could for me."

"Who was threatening you?" Dante demanded. He almost couldn't control himself at the thought. All the confessions culminated into one strict overprotective feeling. He defiantly found himself glad that Logan was dead in spite of himself and his badge.

"Scott Baldwin. He thought I was faking being crazy, that because my mom was crazy I could get away with it, and he started coming after me. That's when my mom really woke up. I mean… she was awake the whole time, but this was the first time anyone else had saw her too." Lulu finished the story by telling him about how her mother had agree to leave with Scotty if he agreed to never press charges against Lulu, how she broke out of Shadybrook, her and her brothers raced off to find her mom, and how her parents returned together. "Then it was all over," Lulu said whipping away her last tear. "You know the rest. Mom went to Paris, I got out of Shadybrook, and… eventually moved in with Maxie."

"And Johnny," Dante corrected and she gave him an amused scoff.

"For a while, but you knew that. That's wasn't a secret."

"I'm glad you told me," Dante ran his fingers through his hair and fell back into the couch.

"I just unloaded a whole lot of baggage on you. You can be freaked out. That's why we have the liquor."

"I'm not freaked out. I mean, I'm… a lot happened. It's a lot to process, but I'm not freaked out. Not by you."

"Do you still love me?"

"More than ever." His hand reached out like it had wanted to for what felt like hours. She was sitting on her knees with her side against the back of the couch. His hand played with her fingers across her thighs. "I really am in love with you. And everything that happened made you who you are now." A light reassurance ran across his face. "Are we going to be okay?"

"Maybe. I hope so," she admitted. "I'm still having trouble with the you being in love with another woman…"

"I'm not!" He interrupted. He had found what his voice had been missing all along when he tried to reassure her; he wasn't trying to convince himself or rewrite history. He meant it as if it were the gospel of his life.

"I don't want to settle for you settling for me." Her voice was smaller than it deserved and he pulled her into his lap before the sentence was even finished. "Tequila sure makes you bold."

"I'm not in love with anybody but you." He looked her directly in the eyes as he spoke. "Part of you knows that or you wouldn't have taken such a gamble at telling me…everything, but you did because you know that deep down we're worth it. And we're only worth it because we truly love each other as much as we say we do. I don't want anybody else and I'm truly sorry for ever being confused about love. I was never confused about you and I don't think I'm ever going to be."

"Okay," was all she had to say before he pulled her into their second first kiss.

[b][u]Author's Note:[/b][/u] I was in the middle of writing the first chapter for Trepidation and I couldn't get this out of my head. So I wrote it. I hope you like it. Now I'm moving on to my other stories.


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